Since the dish was new, Peng made it the house specialty in spite of the dish's commonplace ingredients. Peng claimed his restaurant was the first in New York City to serve Tso's chicken. Peng Chang-kuei (1918-2016), a chef from Hunan who later based in Chongqing and Taipei, rolled out the new dish circa 1973 when he opened the restaurant 'Uncle Peng's Hunan Yuan' on East 44th Street, New York City.

The two claims may be somewhat reconciled in that the current General Tso's chicken recipe - where the meat is crispy fried - was introduced by Chef Wang under the name 'General Ching's chicken', a name which still has trace appearances on menus on the Internet (the identity of its namesake 'General Ching' is, however, unclear) whereas the name 'General Tso's chicken' can be traced to Chef Peng, who cooked it in a different way. Peng and Wang claimed to be the creator respectively. The dish is known by many alternative names, mostly replacing Tso with a different surname.

Chef Eileen Yin-Fei Lo speculated that name 'Zongtang' was not a reference to Zuo Zongtang, but rather a reference to the homophone zongtang (宗堂), meaning 'the hall of the ancestors'. It is an American Chinese cuisine, though it may have had traces of roots of Hunan cuisine.Īlthough the dish was named after Zuo Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t'ang) (1812–1885), a Qing dynasty statesman and military leader from Hunan Province, he could not have eaten the dish or known of it. General Tso's chicken (左宗棠雞, Xiang Chinese:, Mandarin pinyin: Zuǒ Zōngtáng jī) is a sweet and spicy deep-fried chicken dish.

Tao chicken